Workers at Two New York Airports Vote to Strike Today

More than 1,000 security officers, baggage handlers and wheelchair attendants at New York’s LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International Airports voted unanimously to authorize a strike starting Wednesday night.

The contract workers will walk off the job JFK’s Terminal 7, home to British Airways, United Airlines and Cathay Pacific Airways at 10 p.m., potentially causing travel headaches for thousands. The strike will continue through July 23 at JFK and LaGuardia, said Amity Paye, a spokeswoman for Service Employees International Union’s Local 32BJ.

“While the airlines have been making record profits and the Port Authority has approved billions of dollars to modernize LaGuardia airport, the airport workers who make these profits possible are struggling to survive,” said a news release from SEIU 32BJ. The non- union contract workers are employed by Aviation Safeguards, a division of Herndon, Virginia-based Command Security Corp. Most of the employees set to strike work for Delta Airlines Inc. Others work for British Airways and United, a unit of United Continental Holdings Inc., according to Paye. The strike would be the largest since the start of a three-year organizing campaign by the union. Aviation Safeguards has made “repeated, illegal threats to workers,” who want to join, according to a July 20 news release from the union.

Disputed Allegations

Aviation Safeguards has stopped workers from wearing union buttons, misrepresented their rights and threatened to fire them for striking, the news release said.

The security officers going on strike patrol the halls and entries of the airports. They aren’t employees of the Transportation Security Administration, which handles airport checkpoint and baggage screening.

Command Security Chief Executive Officer Craig Coy, said the union’s allegations were false. The company hasn’t violated any laws, he said.

“The company is not anti-union, the company is pro- employee,” Coy said in a telephone interview Monday “This is the United States of America and there’s a process that is well established on how employees go about letting their employer know if they wish to organize and join a union. None of that process has happened here.”

The Port Authority of New York & New Jersey, which runs New York City’s airports, said in a statement that the agency will work to avoid disruption of airline operations.

“The Port Authority has taken significant steps in recent years to encourage wage and benefit increases for employees of airline contractors at its airports,” the agency said in a statement.

Morgan Durrant, a Delta spokesman, deferred comment to the Port Authority. JFK airport employs 37,000 while LaGuardia employs 11,000, according to Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman.

JFK served a record estimated 53.2 million passengers in 2014, while LaGuardia also set an airport high with 26.9 million travelers, the Port Authority said in January.

–With assistance from Michael Sasso in Atlanta.

This article was written by Martin Z. Braun from Bloomberg and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.